Hosting two evenings of six to eight interdisciplinary performances, Donald Hutera and Lilia Pegado put together a series of works over the two dates. They were held in a humble church hall in Chelsea with local residents from the Chelsea Association of Tenants joining an audience of writers, dance makers, and friends. These Spring Performances were the first from the initiative Chelsea Arts Collective, formed by curator and journalist Donald Hutera and visual artist Lilia Pegado, a Chelsea resident. Similar to Hutera’s GOLive event held in September 2014 in Kentish Town, each night was thrown together in a low key and daringly informal format. With several familiar faces from GOLive (including the charismatic Sarah Kent and Yong Min Cho) billed alongside some fresh and bizarre acts, you were guaranteed to find a gem among the stones.

Performer/choreographer Vanio Papadelli, making conversations with her lost mother, took the stones in her hand both metaphorically and physically and was certainly one of those gems. The Air Changes the Colour of Things Here, on 29 March, drew on memory, autobiography, and fiction. Papadelli spoke throughout, the depth of her voice commanding yet tentative, dominating yet vulnerable. Her voice and movements meshed into something somewhat brutal and ugly. Her fidgeting body curled up on a fur rug closely surrounded by her audience, sitting on the floor, set up the intimacy of the coming conversation. Grieving stones were placed in viewers’ hands, as Papadelli asked, questioned, and pleaded, creating a dialogue with her mother through the audience. Just as the moonlight appeared outside the three arched windows, the lighting dimmed to reveal a Madonna-like figure, framed like an altarpiece by the architecture of the hall. A video projected onto her body as she sat on the windowsill of the central tall arched window seemed to resolve the emotional trauma of her journey.

The second evening saw the audience move their chairs into the round to view dance duo immigrants and animals (Jamila Johnson-Small and Mira Kautto), dressed in boldly coloured boiler suits, with the sides of their heads shaved and a row of mini hair buns down the top of the head in a Mohican style. This cool and indifferent pair did not deny their femininity but questioned the ways it might be received via masculine dress and attitude. Laura Laura, a companion piece to the minimal William William, performed at GOLive last autumn, also worked as a standalone piece. The movement style was casual but precise, bouncy but not flippant with tones of hip-hop, raving and ‘dad-dancing’ that made Laura Laura the ultimate cool and unique piece of the night. Mirroring the movements of their own naked figures faintly projected from the waist down on the wall, encouraged the audience to question what, who and how they were observing.  Formalising what could be provocative positions into two repetitive dialogues performed side by side facing their naked counterparts.  The performers (Johnson-Small and Kautto) almost detached themselves from their gender in this section and were confronted with it head on.

These two formal pieces sat well within the mixed billing that included works in progress, musicians, ballet dancing comedians, butoh and inclusive community works. There is a strong interdisciplinary element that weaves throughout Hutera’s line-ups, in particular the incorporation of pieces using speech and autobiography. In Spring Performances, there was no backstage and no fourth wall, the production was unapologetic about its lights, cameras and tripods: this made for evenings that incorporated their own limitations –  the workings became part of the work.  Unforgiving settings like this sort the wheat from the chaff, but in most cases here even the chaff held their own through the charisma and charm of their performers and the daring intuition of Hutera’s and Pegado’s overall programming choices.

Chelsea Arts Collective (CAC) is a new, grassroots initiative masterminded by the painter (and Sutton Estate resident) Lilia Pegado and veteran arts journalist Donald Hutera (The Times, etc). Operating under the auspices of CATS, and with initial funding from City Living, Local Life, CAC aims to provide residents of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea –  and others – with opportunities for stimulating creative expression and exchange. CAC’s next shows are May 30 and 31 with exhibitions in the daytime and performances from 7.30pm, including work by Sarah Kent, Avatara Ayuso and Marguerite Galizia/Dan Watson.